The Consolations of Philosophy?

Guest Column by Mitchell Abidor

I visited my friend Tony, intending to bid him farewell, the day after he entered home hospice. We’d been each other’s closest friend, confidant, and lay therapist for almost twenty years, and his loss, I knew, was going to be irreplaceable.

We had become friends late in life, and we both treasured our late discovery of each other. When his first marriage was falling apart, one that from the outside looked ideal, I was the person in whom he confided the truth, and whose approval helped  him make the decisions he needed to make. He heard my darkest opinions and thoughts, and never judged me negatively for them.

We chatted during that planned farewell visit, and he surprisingly expressed hope that he’d be able to pull back from the brink of death, a death he’d been living with for ten years, living as he was with a form of cancer that kills most within weeks. His optimism, feigned or not, convinced me to forgo the farewell, and as I got up to leave, I told him I’d be back in a few days. But now he was having none of the optimism he’d shown: “What makes you think I’ll still be around in a few days?” he said.

The sobs burst out of us, and as we hugged he cried out, “I’m not ready to die.” The terror on his face, the sound of those words, were the most horrible things I’ve ever experienced. If there is a moment of my life I’d want to erase, that’s it.

I was able to visit Tony one more time, and we reminisced about his past peccadilloes and mine. Then, gesturing towards his phone, he spoke of all the messages of support and affection he’d received, and how touched he was by them. It was his consolation in his final days

A few months earlier, when his cancer had become more aggressive, Tony had sought consolation elsewhere, turning to the works of the Stoics, hoping they’d give him the strength, the calmness he knew would not come naturally in his final weeks and months. I’d told him not to waste his time.

A couple of years ago I, too, had been gravely ill. In fact, we viewed our illnesses as a race: Which of us would die first? I had also read the Stoics, thinking that if my heart was going to kill me, I’d face my death the same way I’d lived: experiencing everything through a literary scrim. I learned from these Roman sages that death was of no importance: I didn’t exist before I was born, I wouldn’t exist after I died, and there was no difference between the two states. Death, in fact, isn’t even an even in our lives. I’ll feel nothing when it comes for me, since I won’t exist any longer once it achieves its goal. Epictetus wrote that “I cannot escape death but at least I can escape the fear of it.” Seneca wrote that “No man enjoys the true taste of life, but he who is ready and willing to quit it.”

And yet, when a moment arrived in my travails when it truly seemed I was going to die, all my reading turned out to be for nought.

Laying in the CCU, I found that, like Tony, I wasn’t ready to die, despite all my reading. I almost spontaneously found the flaw in the Stoics’ reasoning, and it was an obvious one. True, I didn’t exist before I was born, and also true I wouldn’t exist after I died, but once I was born my existence had changed the world, and my future non-existence was no longer a matter of indifference. There were people I loved and who loved me, and my disappearance would matter to them. Even more, the thought that I’d never see them again was unacceptable. In the abstract our death is nothing; for us and those around us, it is everything.

The Stoics became unbearable. Tony’s tears were a great refusal of the inhumanity of Stoicism, a realization that philosophy fails to provide the consolations it promises, or that we hope to find in it. It isn’t Marcus Aurelius or Seneca who will give us comfort; only those around us can do that. Only they can reassure us in our moments of ultimate despair that the space between the two nothingnesses that bracket our lives was a good one. Tony’s cry of pain at the thought of his imminent death, and his subsequent happiness at realizing how loved he was, are the true wells of philosophy. His death was that of a noble man, one I loved deeply, and I was not alone in this. We who survive him prove by our continued love for him that his life was a good one.

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Mitchell Abidor is a Brooklyn-based translator and historian. His latest book is a translation of Claude Amet’s 1920 novel, Ariane, A Russian Girl, published as an NYRB Classics.

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